Saturday, March 31, 2012

Romney's Big Lie

by David Atkins

It's not news that Mitt Romney lies constantly, about big things and little things alike. But the biggest lies, the most nefarious, are the lies of narrative. They're the lies that Mitt Romney and his conservative allies get away with, because the narratives are never challenged in the press.

Case in point: a fundraising letter I got in the mail from the Romney campaign. It's filled with lies of omission and commission, of course, but I want to focus on this bit especially:

President Obama has mortgaged our future, increased the budget by more than 20% and allowed our debt to skyrocket. In fact, by the end of his term he will add nearly as much debt as all the previous presidents combined. That's right...all the previous presidents COMBINED.

Simply put, President Obama's policies created a deeper recession and delayed the recovery. The consequence is soaring numbers of Americans enduring unemployment, foreclosures, and bankruptcies. The way I see it, this is a moral tragedy. Unemployment is not just a statistic...nearly 13 million Americans unemployed is not just a number.

Unemployment means kids can't go to college. That marriages break up under the financial strain, that young people can't find work and start their lives, and men and women in their 50s, in the prime of their lives, fear they will never find a job again.

Liberals should be ashamed that they and their policies have failed these good and decent Americans!

Without a paycheck, you can't take care of your family. Without a paycheck, you can't buy school books for your kids, keep a car on the road, or help an aging parent make ends meet. Without a paycheck, it can feel like there is no hope.

But there is hope--if we change course before it's too late. America--quite literally--cannot afford another four years of fiscally irresponsible leadership in the White House.

But the biggest lie isn't any of these. It's the narrative. Romney is suggesting that President Obama's "fiscal irresponsibility" has "deepened the recession and delayed the recovery." Let's ignore all the little lies that go into that claim for a moment. Let's pretend that the stimulus did nothing to curtail unemployment. Let's pretend that the President did seriously increase the deficit more than his predecessor. And let's pretend that Romney's preferred policies would not, in fact, do untold damage to the economy and the middle class.

The big lie still remains: under no circumstances whatsoever has the spending or the deficit hurt economic recovery. There's not even a coherent argument based in economic fantasy to claim such a thing. In order for spending to hurt an economy, it would have to do so by causing a deficit. Spending alone has zero negative impact on an economy, unless it comes theoretically at the cost of increased taxes--also not harmful in the right proportions, but irrelevant since the President has actually lowered taxes since taking office.

So we have low taxes, low inflation, and a strong Treasuries market. Under those circumstances, it is quite literally economically impossible for government spending to have "deepened the recession and delayed the recovery." At worst it had no impact--and nearly every economist agrees that that itself is also untrue. Government spending had a considerable effect on lowering unemployment.

Sometimes it's so tempting and so easy to get caught up in refuting all of Romney's factual claims, that it's easy to lose sight of the big lie that is his narrative. It would be nice if members of the press would call him or his conservative friends out on this whopper. But that might be difficult, as they've all been telling the same big lie in their way for years.